safe in the wrong arms

Two Faces, One Crown

# Luca's POV

Barcelona glittered beneath floor-to-ceiling windows, morning light sliding across marble floors, framed art, furniture that belonged in a design magazine more than a bedroom.

The city was already awake.

I wasn't. Not completely.

I lay with one arm behind my head, listening to the low hum of the air conditioning, half-aware of the woman shifting beside me under the silk sheets, murmuring something I didn't bother catching. Or maybe I just wasn't listening. My attention was already somewhere else — season prep, a photo shoot, business, and the other kind of business.

My phone lit up on the nightstand. Three missed calls. Two encrypted messages. A wall of social notifications I'd never open.

Secretary. Agent. And then — the one that actually got me moving — *X.*

I sat up and surveyed the wreckage of the room. Clothes everywhere. A couple of wine glasses abandoned on the floor. Same as always.

I dialed X. He picked up on the first ring.

"Morning, boss."

"Talk to me." I swung my legs out of bed.

"You're needed at the warehouse." His voice was flat, all business.

"Okay. I'm on my way."

I let the shower run hot until the room filled with steam, and ten minutes later I was out, dressed, dragging a comb through my hair in the mirror of the walk-in wardrobe — cream ivory shirt, black suit. When I stepped back into the bedroom, she was still asleep, smiling like she'd earned it.

I guess I had given her one hell of a performance last night.

I crossed the room and shook her shoulder gently. She murmured, stirred, didn't open her eyes.

"Aah—" I caught myself right before her name should have come out, because I didn't have one to give her. "Babe. Get up. It's time to go."

"Wait, a couple more minutes." She burrowed deeper. "Maybe breakfast?"

"We'll grab something on the way. Get up now, baby." I made my voice as warm as I could fake it, which was very warm indeed. This would probably be our first and last morning together — unless she turned out to be one of the persistent ones, the type who wanted seconds after a single night. Most weren't worth the effort of a second round.

She finally sat up, and I walked her out, my hand at the small of her back the whole way to the elevator. Downstairs, I made an excuse about a meeting, flagged her a cab, and pressed some cash into her hand for lunch.

"We'll see each other again, right?" She looked up at me with an innocence she clearly didn't feel.

"Yeah, baby. I'll make time."

"But you don't have my number."

"Don't worry." I winked. "I've got your socials."

She ate it up completely.

---

I got into the Aston Martin with two cars falling into formation ahead of me and two behind — overkill to anyone watching, necessary to anyone who understood what I actually did for a living. On the drive, I passed my own face three times over: a shoe ad, a club sponsorship banner, a lotion campaign with my jaw doing most of the selling. It should have unsettled me, seeing myself plastered across a city like that. It didn't. Not anymore. This was nothing compared to some places.

I called Scarlett.

"Morning, Scarlett."

"Morning, Mr. Vale."

"Reschedule my morning meetings. I need to make a stop first."

"Yes, sir. For how long?"

"Two hours."

"Okay, will do."

I dropped the phone into the cupholder and started flipping through documents on my lap, glancing up only when the car slowed at a red light and a crowd began forming around it like they'd been waiting there all morning — phones out, someone shouting for an autograph, someone else just wanting a photo through the tinted glass. My security peeled them off before it became a problem. It always did.

The warehouse sat on the outskirts, old and weathered and forgettable — exactly how I liked my buildings. From the street it looked condemned. Inside, it ran like a machine: steel shelving stretching to the ceiling, crates stacked in perfect rows, every aisle numbered, every pallet labeled, forklifts gliding through their routes without a wasted motion. Workers nodded as I passed. No one stopped. No one panicked. The operation didn't care who was watching — it simply continued, the way it always did.

X was waiting near the center aisle — tall, grey suit, tablet tucked under one arm. He could've passed for corporate counsel if you didn't know better.

"Boss."

"Show me."

No handshake. No small talk. Just business.

He handed over the tablet.

"Sorry to pull you in for something this small, boss. Dante's out of town, and someone needed to sign off on the delivery."

"You called me here." I stopped walking. "To babysit a delivery. Do I look like I have that kind of time?"

"No, boss. There's a real problem." His face stayed composed, but something behind it wasn't. "For the last few weeks, pieces have been going missing from shipments. It started with one rifle short per crate. Then two. Now we're looking at a hundred crates coming up light, and there's no telling how long it's actually been happening — the numbers move slow enough to hide it."

"You're sure."

"Inventory's been checked three times."

I scrolled through what he'd pulled together — shipment logs, serial numbers, container IDs, signatures, timestamps. Everything documented, everything traceable, and underneath all of it, a slow bleed I could see in the monthly totals and the customer complaints Dante had already started fielding.

"I want a list. Every worker present for every one of these deliveries."

I handed the tablet back.

"I want every detail."

"Whoever's stealing from me is about to learn what that costs."

I stayed to oversee the rest of the delivery before heading to the office.

---

I walked into the building like a man who owned it, because I did. This wasn't the warehouse — nobody here flinched when I passed. What I got instead was something closer to respect, the kind that didn't need fear to hold it up.

Scarlett caught me before I reached the elevator, a stack of files against her chest, heels clicking a rhythm against the marble, blonde hair loose over her shoulders. I fell into step beside her, matching her pace.

"Mr. Vale. Good to see you today."

"You have a meeting with the executives in twenty minutes."

"Cool. Let's see how fast I get bored this time." I said it dry enough that she didn't bother laughing.

"Get me a coffee. And something light to eat."

"Yes, sir."

---

Twenty minutes later, I stood at the head of a boardroom table with the whole city stretched out behind glass, twelve executives seated around it, a slide glowing on the projector behind me.

"No."

The room went quiet.

The marketing director blinked. "I'm sorry?"

"The campaign." I gestured at the screen. "We're selling a product. Not an ego."

Nobody spoke.

I read the line straight off the slide: *The future belongs to us.*

I let it sit there a second before I looked around the table. "It doesn't. The future belongs to the customer. Rewrite it."

The director nodded, already reaching for his pen. "Of course."

"And—" I turned to another executive down the table. "The scholarship program."

"The budget?"

"Double it."

A few heads turned at that.

"The board approved five million."

"I know. I want ten."

One of them frowned. "That's a significant increase."

"It is." I held his gaze until he looked back down at his notes. "Technology changes lives."

I thought, briefly, of a boy who used to believe there was no life outside crime — and didn't say anything about him out loud. "If we're lucky enough to make it, someone else should get the chance to start."

No one argued. They just wrote it down.

The meeting ended twelve minutes early, which was exactly how I liked it. If something takes an hour, it should need an hour. Otherwise people are just talking to hear themselves.

Scarlett caught up with me as the room emptied.

"Your one o'clock's been moved."

"To?"

"Tomorrow. Family emergency."

I nodded once. "Send flowers."

She blinked. "Sir?"

"His mother's in the hospital."

"...Right."

"And tell him not to worry about the presentation."

She was already scribbling it down. "I'll take care of it."

I kept walking. Behind me, she called out again.

"Oh — X has called six times."

"I know."

"He said it was urgent."

"It is."

---

I canceled my physio check-up — the chaos at the warehouse had eaten the whole morning — but as captain, I could get away with sliding it to tomorrow with the rest of the squad. So instead I drove straight to the training grounds, where the usual crowd was pressed against the fencing, chanting my name like it belonged to them a little too.

*"Vale... Vale... Vale..."*

I smiled, waved, gave them exactly what they came for. Somewhere underneath it, I already knew: if they ever found out what I actually did behind closed doors, that adoration would curdle into something else entirely. But the two lives didn't touch. They couldn't. One was who I was. The other was what I owed.

"Morning, Leon," I said to the security guard at the gate.

"Morning, Mr. Vale."

My reserved spot was empty, waiting. I parked and headed for the pitch.

"Wow, look who decided to show up." Trent, predictably.

"Weren't you supposed to be at a check-up?" Rodney added.

"Got held up somewhere," I said, dropping my bag. "Figured I'd slum it with you idiots instead."

Drills first. Then pressing work. Two hours disappeared without me noticing.

---

From there it was straight to a photo shoot — brand ambassador duties for Real, a juice company that actually did right by the small farmers it sourced from, the kind of brand I didn't mind lending my face to. One picture, it turned out, could take an exhausting amount of effort to get right.

Dinner with an executive came next, then back to the office for a stack of accounting documents I worked through in a dim room, page after page, until the numbers blurred.

I got home at nine.

The house was dark, the way it had been for over a decade — no one waiting up, no lights left on for me. I liked it that way. It meant nothing in there could be used against me. Love made you weak, and everyone you loved eventually died. Love had never been part of my future, and I'd stopped resenting that a long time ago.

I showered, changed into something soft, and settled onto the couch with a book and a cup of coffee. A few pages in, my eyes started giving out on me.

I let them. Tomorrow was already going to be long.